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Re: Topband: Best wire antenna for roof top location

To: topband@contesting.com
Subject: Re: Topband: Best wire antenna for roof top location
From: Jim Brown <jim@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: jim@audiosystemsgroup.com
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2015 22:56:48 -0700
List-post: <topband@contesting.com">mailto:topband@contesting.com>
On Sat,8/8/2015 10:36 AM, W2RU - Bud Hippisley wrote:
but, with the usual wire sag, the feedpoint was about 5 feet above the gravel.  We 
weren’t worried, because the roof was at least 70 feet above the surrounding 
terrain.

Hmmm! Let's remind ourselves of Nuradi's situation. The roof is 110m high, 45m x 33 m. Corner to corner is less than a wavelength on 80M, more than a wavelength on 40M, but the distance to a corner from a wire strong between the two corners is less than a quarter wave on 80M, less than a half wave on 40. Assuming an ideal conductor on the roof, it's going to act as a reflector going upward, but the low angle pattern will be determined in the far field.

I've not worked before with two ground media, so I pulled out W7EL's instructions for doing so. I built a very simple model attempting to roughly simulate Nuradi's situation. I'm running NEC2 with EZNEC Pro5. The first ground medium is sea water, with a radius 120 ft (it's a rectangular building so that's an approximation. The second medium is Very Poor: cities, industrial, and it's at -360 ft. Yes, I'd like to elevate the first medium and have the second medium at 0 ft, but EZNEC won't let me do that. I simulated 40M and 80 dipoles in the range of 20-30 ft. What I got was a two lobe vertical pattern -- a VERY strong, very narrow low angle lobe, and a broad upward lobe whose strength depends on the height of the dipole above the roof. Very low (5 ft) makes the bottom lobe VERY narrow and VERY low (about 2 degrees) and makes the high lobe a lot weaker. Yes, it's a poor antenna -- IF its low to the roof. But if it's up 20-30 ft, a horizontally polarized wire looks like a nice DX antenna.

What am I missing?

And, like I said before and several others added -- all that stuff on the roof is likely to be mondo noisy.

73, Jim K9YC
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